[Peace-discuss] History we're not supposed to know

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Gary Leupp writes on CounterPunch abut the history Obama falsifies.  --CGE]


...recall there was a time when the U.S. State Department was hell-bent to drive 
a secular government out of Afghanistan---one that wanted to educate girls and 
establish local clinics and curb the power of the tribal chiefs and 
mullahs---and determined to assist the most profoundly reactionary forces in 
Afghanistan with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at their head in establishing an 
alternative Islamist regime. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew 
Brzezinski thought the pro-Soviet Saur Revolution in 1978, in which left-wing 
Afghan Army officers staged a coup and the Democratic People’s Party seized 
power, producing a backlash from the mullahs and tribal chiefs, was a golden 
Cold War opportunity.

Even before Soviet forces crossed the border in December 1979, the CIA was 
organizing Afghan and international forces to challenge the leftish government 
and Brzezinski was urging the fighters to view their struggle as a jihad or Holy 
War. This continued of course through the eight bloody years of the Reagan 
administration. The jihadis won, Washington’s friends established a regime in 
1993, immediately fell out among themselves plunging the country into 
Tajik-Pashtun civil war involving the bombing of Kabul (hitherto spared in the 
fighting). Washington politely distanced itself, having lost interest with the 
collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving ally Pakistan to deal with the mess.

Pakistan opted to support the Taliban, a force which against the motley backdrop 
of opium-dealing, boy-raping warlords seemed attractive by virtue of its 
reputation for moral probity if nothing else.  Former Pakistani Prime Minister 
Benazir Bhutto later explained Islamabad needed to embrace the Taliban to 
maintain the trade lines through Central Asia. The U.S. kept its distance from 
the harshly fundamentalist group, which took power in 1996, withholding 
diplomatic recognition. But it was historically responsible for its inception 
and the descent of Afghanistan into the disaster of medieval reaction that began 
with the stoning of adulterous women in soccer stadiums and culminated with the 
blasting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.

The sins of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan are just staggering. Imagine what 
might have happened had the U.S. just stayed out of Afghan affairs from the late 
1970s and allowed that experiment in secular. reformist government in a highly 
conservative Muslim society to take its course without billions in arms to 
precisely the sort of fighters who are being vilified as “Islamic extremists” 
and “terrorists” today. There may have never been an international 
CIA-coordinated mujahadeen movement, no young Osama bin Laden persuaded to 
suspend his studies to head up Arab holy warriors in coordination with the CIA, 
no total collapse of Afghan society, no “blowback.” Unfortunately people in this 
country are generally clueless about the recent history of Southwest Asia and 
the role of U.S. administrations in producing the very problems about which they 
complain. (I don’t include Obama among these; he knows what he’s doing. Hence 
total moral culpability.)

The Taliban never invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan; he was there when they 
took power, guest of a warlord who had been hostile to themselves. He had flown 
in from Sudan, booted out by the government there following a demand from the 
U.S. The Taliban extended to him the hospitality required by the pashtunwali 
code, in appreciation for his services in anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s. But 
as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have documented on this site, from 
2000 the Taliban initiated talks in Frankfurt with the EU, facilitated by the 
Afghan-American businessman Kabir Mohabbat, to transfer bin Laden out of the 
country. Mohabbat was employed from November by the National Security Council to 
negotiate with the Taliban about bin Laden’s fate.

The Taliban, who had confined bin Laden and his key aides to his compound at 
Daronta, 30 miles from Kabul, invited the U.S. to send one of two Cruise 
missiles as the easiest way to solve the problem but the Clinton administration 
delayed in taking action. The Bush administration also dispatched Mohabbat 
repeatedly to Kabul---three times in 2001---to discuss bin Laden.  In other 
words, at minimum, on can say that the State Department knew, and we should 
know, and Obama should know, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are two very different things.

So if the president argues that we need to continue the fight with more troops 
to keep the Taliban down, to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a center of 
international terrorism, he’s going to be speaking so much eloquent nonsense.

He will probably not address the recent comment by the Prime Minister of 
Pakistan, the country after Afghanistan itself most victimized by U.S. 
aggression in the region. Speaking in English Yousef Raza Gilani told reporters:

“Our only concern is that when US sends more troops to Afghanistan’s Helmand 
area, if there will be influx of militants they will be moving to Balochistan. 
This is the concern that we already discussed with the US administration, that 
influx of militants towards Balochistan should be taken care of otherwise that 
can destabilise Balochistan.

“A stable Afghanistan is in Pakistan’s interest - but at the same time we also 
do not want our country to be destabilized. We have asked US administration to 
consult us in case of any paradigm shift in the policy... so that we can 
formulate our strategy accordingly.”

Balochistan is over 40 per cent of the land area of his country. It is beset 
with ethnic unrest; some of the majority Balochis resent the fact that they 
receive few profits from the exploitation of the uranium and copper of their 
region, and are neglected by Islamabad. There is an armed insurgency led by 
members of the Bugti tribe. This has some support from educated Pakistanis 
critical of “Pashtun chauvinism” who accuse the state of trying to keep Balochis 
backward. (While listed as “terrorist” by the State Department this movement is 
a separate phenomenon from the Taliban.)

State Department officials have dismissed Pakistani concerns. Isn’t that typical 
though? They have been dismissing them since the initial invasion in 2001, and 
as Pakistan becomes more and more destabilized, the U.S. merely repeats its 
demands for more military cooperation, continues its drone strikes across the 
border, and pursues its goals in the region in what Islamabad perceives as 
disregard for its interests. Pakistan has its own problems that policy-makers in 
the U.S. State Department seem either not to understand or to willfully ignore 
as it exacerbates them.

And President Obama will not mention that according to the Asia Foundation’s 
2009 poll in Afghanistan 56 per cent of respondents say they have some sympathy 
for the motivations of the armed groups, including the Taliban and Hekmatyar’s 
outfit, opposing occupation. He won’t note how the PR strategy of depicting this 
effort as a “liberation” symbolized by the removal of the burqa has been long 
since quietly shelved, since the burqa is actually back with a vengeance and the 
warlords upon whom the U.S. must rely to maintain order have always laughed at 
U.S. proposals for social reform. They know that’s not what the troops are there 
for.

The U.S. intervened indirectly in Afghanistan in the ‘80s, with no thought for 
the welfare of the Afghan people and with tragic consequences for them, in order 
to fight the Soviets and the imagined menace of “communism.” To do that it 
nurtured a ferocious Islamist extremist trend. There’s never been any 
acknowledgement of error or apology and don’t expect one. It all made sense at 
the time from a U.S. imperialist point of view.

What makes sense now, from a U.S. imperialist point of view? Just look at the 
map. Realize that Afghanistan has no products the U.S. corporate world wants or 
needs. During the Cold War, Iran, Iraq, Turkey sometimes played crucial roles in 
U.S. geostrategic thinking but Afghanistan was practically conceded to the 
Soviet camp even before 1978. It only acquired significance as a Cold War 
battleground when U.S. strategists realized  (in Brzezinski’s words) that they 
could “bleed the Soviets…the way they did us in Vietnam.” More recently, it has 
acquired significance as U.S. energy corporations do global battle with the 
Russians over access to Caspian Sea natural gas.

At present Europe is dependent on the supply of gas via Russia from the Caspian 
Sea, principally from Turkmenistan. This gives Moscow enormous political 
leverage when it comes to such matters as NATO’s decision to admit Georgia or 
Ukraine. U.S. policy has been to build pipelines from the Caspian avoiding 
Russia or Iran. Construction of the TAPI 
(Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which will pump the gas 
straight to the Indian Ocean and on to world markets has been long delayed due 
to the fighting in Afghanistan.

The pipeline will run through Helmand province, then into Pakistan’s 
Balochistan. If it all works out, this will represent a highly significant 
improvement in the geostrategic position of the U.S. in the region, including in 
the event of another world war (such as might be provoked by a U.S. attack on 
Iran’s nuclear facilities and unpredictable repercussions of such action).

But Obama will not be talking about the history of U.S. intervention in 
Afghanistan, or the feelings of the Afghan people about occupation, or the 
reactions of the Pakistanis to the unmitigated disaster on their doorstep, or 
the real geopolitical reasons for U.S. interest in this backward impoverished 
Central Asian nation that has been “the graveyard of empires” since the time of 
Alexander the Great.

He will say it’s still a necessary war to defend Americans from terrorist 
attack. We should recall, once again, the observation of Nazi war criminal 
Hermann Goering during the Nuremburg trial that while “naturally the common 
people don’t want war … the people can always be brought to the bidding of the 
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, 
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to 
danger. It works the same in any country.”

We should respond: No it’s not necessary! in the streets that day and those 
following---until we force Obama to end what are now unmistakably his criminal 
imperialist wars.

http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11302009.html